Well, still testing drives, 8 at a time, can only really do 2 batches a day. I currently have a 12" stack (30 cm) of bad 2.5" drives. I wasn't sure it would work but the mobo will access all 8 SATA ports correctly, so that saved a little time.

I haven't got the bench space but I'll bet this works:

Abit IC-7G Socket 478 motherboard, mostly cleaned (was horribly dirty, CPU fan was soaking when I took the pic). There's a Northwood 2.8 (I think) in there, I don't even care I think I have a 3.2 and I think it's supported... but the board has to work. I guess I need two workbenches. I've got two Dell 2007 FPbs... hmmm...

There's also this odd thing:

I can only assume it's for some early WD SATA drive which had an odd structure around the SATA connector, or meant to be attached to an IDE->SATA adapter, because it doesn't fit on Earth hard drives. I mean you could just cut the extension off, it's just clear plastic. But, it's an odd thing.

I keep forgetting to ship something out, too, like a loser (sigh). Have to print a tutorial to install it, too.

You can connect it to the motherboard itself, however, that depends on how many of the SATA ports are adjacent to each other.

I determined that the 9W UV LED Nail Art Dryer does indeed erase an EPROM. It takes about 4 days, but that's better than nothing.

Round 751 of trying to get the Amiga to work for long enough to do anything with it. It had the blinking power LED. I swapped a bunch of ICs out one by one with spares from another dead A2000. Finally, it booted. Once. After that it stopped recognizing the harddisk, so all I get is the checkmark screen. I guess that is slightly better than a blinking power LED. Since the IDE interface appears to be dead, my next plan is to connect a SCSI HDD to a PC somehow and set one of those up, and maybe get the Amiga to boot from the GVP HC+8 card.

It's too bad that Amiga can't boot from serial port like the XT-IDE BIOS does.

Merovign wrote:

There's also this odd thing:

Its a SecureConnect (gen)2 SATA cable that WD released for their own compatible drives - won't fit other makes.

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

Merovign wrote:

There's also this odd thing:

Its a SecureConnect (gen)2 SATA cable that WD released for their own compatible drives - won't fit other makes.

Ah - couldn't find it without the name. It was apparently to increase the physical strength of the connector - lot of broken SATA connectors in the early days - and looking at the connectors on my IC7G, not surprised.

Tested my ECS KN1 Extreme w/ AMD FX-57.. works!

Finished sorting through the last lot of old RAM that I purchased.

I had already removed the SIMM style flash cards that came from old networking hardware.

Found out that some of the 72-pin sticks were Postscript sticks for old HP Lasetjet printers. Went ahead and stuck those up on eBay.

Most sticks were 72-pin SIMMs of varying sizes along with a few 30-pin SIMMs and even a COAST cache module and a cache module for an old Gateway 2000 computer.

Thallanor wrote:

The 720K 3.5" drive was on its way out in my Tandy but you can just swap in a 1.44M drive (though it operates at a 720K drive) but Tandy uses some of the ground lines on the floppy cable to deliver power, so obviously you want to sever those as to not destroy your replacement drive.

Behold, my absolute hack job. Compare to Tandy's nice ones on the left. (The center connector goes to the board, the nice Tandy-severed side goes to the 5.25" floppy drive as it gets its power from molex. The side I butchered is what goes to the new 3.5" drive.)

It's not pretty but I'm not trying to sell it. 😀 It works and that makes me happy.

Afraid I've got you beat:

This masterpiece was built as a result of the IDE SSD drive I have connected to the I/O controller. It has no way to pass a slave through it, so I had to solder pins onto the rear of the card and connect an IDE cable to it, which didn't work because the pinout was mirrored. So, 40 cuts, 40 strips, 40 solder points, 40 heat shrink tubes, and 40 hits with a lighter (I may have used a heat gun, not sure) and I've got a cable that Foxconn themselves are envious of, probably gonna reverse engineer this and make millions 😜

Pic of controller card:

It works, and it's not for sale, so I'm also happy with it 😉

But what I actually did today was finish rebuilding that junked AWE32:

Some of the best soldering you've ever seen:

Done!

Now what remains is to plug it in and see if it still works!

I've also started on rebuilding my Compaq 4/25 LTE's battery pack. Man was this hard to open:

NiCd's ordered.

Did a lot of tidying up yesterday. I spend more time sorting through stuff than actually doing things with it, so things need to go. Sold a set of 1980s-era I/O within minutes, and have someone interested in an AT bigtower and a box of tape drive stuff. He also wanted the MFM stuff, so decided to offer him my fully working, no bad sectors ST-412. Of course I tested it first. Not happy with results.

BIOS won't detect it, gives HDC error when set to type 1. OnStream Disk Manager does, and can start low-level format, but gives errors reproducibly at 11% Looks like the patient died somewhere between going into storage last year and now :'(

Tried to get my Dell GX110 working. It did not work. Fans spin for a moment, then stop; no beep codes, front panel flashess yellow yellow green and dies. Tried running the system without any IDE drives or PCI cards, tried switching the CPU, same deal. I tried looking at the PSU but it's very difficult to open up, from what I could glimpse there are no bulging caps (but some dead bugs did fall out of it.. yikes!) Time to look for a new PSU I guess. I hate Compaq's proprietary PSUs..

I have this Mitsumi 5.25" drive which has erratic behavior. So i decided to clean it and maybe replace the caps i can find.
First stage is done:

dionb wrote:

BIOS won't detect it, gives HDC error when set to type 1. OnStream Disk Manager does, and can start low-level format, but gives errors reproducibly at 11% Looks like the patient died somewhere between going into storage last year and now :'(

Crap, I have a 10 Mb MFM that works flawlessly. Maybe I should eBay it before it meets the same fate... Or put it into something. I love that startup whirl but I don't have a system old enough to support such a drive.

Jed118 wrote:

Afraid I've got you beat: […]
Show full quote

Afraid I've got you beat:

🤣. Holy hell, you have that right! I'm glad that you got it to work though!

I have been working to clean my work area so that I can take some pictures and film some unboxing videos. I've been meaning to do this for liqmat for the past 3-6 months.

My lighting equipment, tripods, accessories arrived this past week and I bought a new (to me) Panasonic G7 camera this weekend and so that's been my incentive to move forward on this. I really want to start documenting this stuff.

Other than that, I've been busy working to get my Trantor T-128 SCSI adapter to work with my SCSI2SD adapter in my Tandy 1000 TL/2. (A whole different thread on that!) I've finally got that working! Now I need to remove everything, clean it all up, and then document the build.

Whee!

I have been testing my earlier revision Cardinal SNAPplus (BIOS revision 2.20) and comparing it to my late revision Cardinal SNAPplus (BIOS revision 2.22). Both seem to very close in functionality and benchmark results, but a couple of differences between the revisions I found interesting.

1.) In the BIOS revision 2.22 manual under the installation instructions it states not to change the SW1 dip switches from the factory settings with no explanation as to why or what they do. In the BIOS revision 2.20 manual it gives detailed instructions of what the SW1 dip switch settings do. Apparently SW1 was used if you had multiple Cardinal SNAPplus cards installed. Did Cardinal find the SW1 settings too troublesome and just gave up on that feature for their later revision card? It's a good possibility and a good question that modem7 of Vcfed asked when I submitted to him the 2.20 manual pages with the SW1 dip switch info for his -0˚ website. You can see the differences by looking at the two different installation instructions:

Cardinal SNAPplus BIOS revision 2.22 SW1 dip switch info:

Cardinal SNAPplus BIOS revision 2.20 SW1 dip switch info:

Another interesting find on the SNAPplus was when I benchmarked the card in DOS. According to this 1992 PC Magazine article the Cardinal SNAPplus's Tseng ET4000AX chip only used the 8-bit portion of the ISA slot, but then it goes on to state they would correct that in a later BIOS revision. As you can see from the results it actually does a bit better than a standard 16-bit VGA baseline.

This photo just shows the sheer size of the card while installed in one of my Socket 5 motherboards during testing.

One last tidbit of info is all hardware reporting software will show the SNAPplus has only 1MB DRAM and that is correct for usable memory, but there is also 1MB of VRAM which is used for internal processes relating to its video capture/video overlay genlock features.

Is the Thinkpad x220 retro? It is not that old. Anyway....

Setting up Ubuntu Mate 18.04 on my "new" Thinkpad X220 laptop. So far, I have Samba up and running. And I have updated the installation with stuff like media codecs, flash and Oracle Java. Background images are in place and I am copying the image directory from the Xubuntu installation to the Ubuntu Mate installation as of now. The terminal is set up as well, and the Linux version of Etcher is installed as well. Oh boy, the X220 is fast, and I only have 8gb of Ram on it right now. Planning to upgrade it to 16gb in the future. It will be my next daily driver, despite the screen only being a 12 inch in widescreen (12.1 or something). And Ubuntu Mate are looking so damn nice. Feels so great as well.

McBierle wrote:

I have this Mitsumi 5.25" drive which has erratic behavior. So i decided to clean it and maybe replace the caps i can find.
First stage is done:

WP_20190415_011.jpg

How are you going to realign the heads?

I have been working on getting a classic 486, the DX2-66 with local bus, up and running. It has not exactly been smooth sailing, however. I'm having trouble setting up the mouse, of all things. Ctmouse installs the Mouse Systems/COM port driver, but the machine hangs as soon as it receives any input from the mouse.

I have a feeling that it all boils down to incorrect serial port parameters, but I cannot for the life of me find the related settings in the BIOS. Sad thing is, decades ago I used to be good at all of this stuff. 😊

65C02 wrote:

I have been working on getting a classic 486, the DX2-66 with local bus, up and running. It has not exactly been smooth sailing, however. I'm having trouble setting up the mouse, of all things. Ctmouse installs the Mouse Systems/COM port driver, but the machine hangs as soon as it receives any input from the mouse.

I have a feeling that it all boils down to incorrect serial port parameters, but I cannot for the life of me find the related settings in the BIOS. Sad thing is, decades ago I used to be good at all of this stuff. 😊

You could also be using a wrong serial port breakout cable (sequential vs staggered, do a forum search 😀 )